Understanding Search Engine Traffic

If you go to any of the major search engines (Google,Yahoo,Bing) and conduct a search the search engine will present the results of the search on a page commonly known  as  SERPS (search engine results page).

How the listings are formatted vary slightly from search engine to search engine but you usually find the divided as shown below:

And here is how it appears on Google:

As You can see the page is divided into two main areas known as paid  and organic.

Websites appear in the organic listings based on merit i.e. there is no payment involved and they appear in the paid listings only if they have paid to advertise on that search engine.

Organic Traffic Pros and Cons

Generally speaking to get organic traffic from any of the search engines you need to be on the first page of the search results for whatever search terms the searcher used. In order for this to happen the search engine has to think that your site/page is more relevant to the searcher than any of the others that also satisfy that search query.

So if the searcher types in blue metal widgets then the search engine will rank all of the pages in its index that contain information about blue metal widgets in order of relevance.

To get yours in the first 10 then it needs to be ( in the opinion) of the search engine more relevant that the other pages that get ranked below it.

Getting your pages ranked in the search engines can be a time consuming process requiring either the services of a search engine specialist or knowledge of SEO (search engine Optimization).

Organic traffic has some very important benefits:

• Free
• Trusted be searcher
• Results in traffic from all three engines.
• Once you are ranked well it can bring you traffic for many years without any real effort on your part.

It Also has some problems:

• Can be difficult to get
• SEO consultants are expensive so the initial cost can be high if you need to use one.
• Can be difficult to do yourself without proper training
• Takes time to get for new sites (many months and maybe years)

Paid Traffic Pros and Cons

There are three main providers of paid advertising services-PPC (pay per click) . They are:

• Google Adwords
• Yahoo Publisher
• Microsoft Adcenter

Paid advertising is also commonly known as paid search involves you bidding for a space on the Search results Page (SERP) of the search engines.

In general the more money you are willing to pay the higher up the page you appear.

Paid traffic has some very important benefits:

• Very Quick to get - in 15 minutes of opening an account.
• Very Targeted.

It Also has some problems:

• Can be very expensive
• Once you stop advertising your traffic stops.
• Can be difficult to do yourself without proper training
• You have to advertise on all three of the major engines if you want traffic from all three.

Related Articles and resources:

• SEO- See An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization
• PPC- See An Introduction to Pay Per Click (Google Adwords)